Thoughts are viruses. Images are viruses. Objects are viruses. Chairs are viruses. Guns are viruses. Adam Lanza's mom bought those guns for home defense, a point that was lost in the blather about the "extraordinary testimony" of the mother in support of home defense yesterday in Congress.

Just as some humans are vectors for chairs, humans can also be vectors for guns.

In future archaeological digs by aliens, some parts of Earth will have enormous strata of chair parts and others will have layer upon layer of gun parts.

A glacier calving, the most massive one ever captured on film. It is calving because of global warming, which is because of the Anthopocene, which is how human history now intersects with geological time. Thanks to Rick Muller. From the movie Chasing Ice.

a region’s agriculture is vulnerable to variations in space weather if it meets three conditions: the local weather must be sensitive to space weather; the local agriculture must be critically vulnerable to sudden changes in weather; and finally, the region must be isolated.

...

medieval England ... is vulnerable because it is in the north Atlantic, dependent on wheat which is vulnerable to weather changes and also isolated from mainland Europe.

...

“All the nine cycles of solar activity during this period are characterized by systematically excessive wheat prices in the years of solar activity minimum, as compared with the prices during the next maximum"...

...that's the title of my talk in October for the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (see “Future Talks”). Here is the cfp (also click here for PDF):

POSTNATURAL
SLSA CONFERENCE 2013 // UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME
The 27th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts

Location Notre Dame, Indiana. Venue University of Notre Dame. Dates October 3–6, 2013. Site Coordinator Laura Dassow Walls, Department of English, University of Notre Dame. Program Chair Ron Broglio, Department of English, Arizona State University.
Paper Proposal Due Date May 1, 2013. Notification of Acceptance June 15, 2013.
SLSA Membership Participants in the 2013 conference must be 2013 members of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. For more information about SLSA, please visit the organization website at www.litsci.org .

CALL FOR PAPERS.
Conference theme: PostNatural. What does it mean to come “after” nature? In 2012, Arctic ice melted to the lowest level in human history; with ice everywhere in retreat, island nations are disap- pearing, species vectors are shifting, tropical diseases are moving north, northern natures-cultures are moving into extinction. Acidification of ocean water already threatens Northwest shellfish farms, while historic wildfires, droughts, floods, and shoreline erosion are the norm. Reality overshoots computer models of global warming even as CO2 emissions escalate. Yet none of this has altered our way of living or our way of thinking: as Fredric Jameson noted, we can imagine the collapse of the planet more easily than the fall of capitalism. What fundamental reorientations of theory—of posthu- manity and animality, of agency, actants, and aporias, of bodies, objects, assemblages and networks, of computing and cognition, of media and bioart—are needed to articulate the simple fact that our most mundane and ordinary lives are, even in the span of our own lifetimes, unsustainable? If we have never been natural, are we now, at last, ecological?

PLEASE NOTE.
Like all SLSA conferences, this is an open conference where a wide range of work will be welcome. Proposed topics may take up any work in literature and science, history of science, philosophy of science, science and art, or science studies. “PostNatural” has been chosen as a theme to organize ongoing conference threads and invite a range of proposals from various dimensions of ecocriti- cism and environmental literature and history.

SUBMISSIONS.
For panel contributions, submit a 250-word abstract with title. Pre-organized panels for consid- eration may include an additional summary paragraph along with proposed session title. Roundta- ble and alternative format panels are encouraged. Submit all proposals and register for the confer- ence at http://www.litsci.org/slsa13, starting in February 2013.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

"Schwarzenegger's political career was identical to his aesthetic one. He was a fascist robot who fought against worse fascist robots, with the explicit intention of destroying girlie men, but with the implicit result of dissolving himself in the burning lead of masculinity."--Discuss

Monday, January 28, 2013

I used this in researching Realist Magic: the original research a couple of years ago was in fruit flies. They smell not the shape of the molecule directly touching a receptor, but a quantum vibration, somewhat nonlocally.

The thing is, quantum phenomena at this scale begin to put paid to the standard model...

I love what Zizek says about atonal music. I think he is a closet Schellingian who only believes he is a Hegelian, personally. He writes so incredibly well in that mode.

So I'm listening to Stockhausen. I don't have everything he did by any means but I've been into it since I was 12.

The HMV chain is having trouble in the UK. When I was 12 I used to go down into the basement of the Oxford Street store and pour over the contemporary music as if it was from another world (it is). The smell of the vinyl and the plastic sleeves the record sleeves came in.

My first purchase from there was Stockhausen's Mantra. Still amazing to me.

Rosa Parks on a bus,
Lightning of justice strikes down.
Thunder the voice of the King speaking his dream.
Rain, a waterfall of justice raining down,
Raining down on the 50 states of America.
Forever let freedom and justice ring.

In our house it's traditional on MLK day to play this. “Can You Feel It” by Mr. Fingers. We visited a graveyard of freed slaves that is just up the street from us, in the historic Fourth Ward. Wordsworth would have found it spine chilling.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Chairs are all trying to kill you. I have just realized that one particular chair is responsible for this chronic whiplash that I have, a whiplash that is worse than (so I read online) most of the worst whiplash from high speed car impacts.

Turns out my mum has been suffering for months with a terrible back, and that my grandfather had to have two vertebrae fused in his upper spine.

Why? The same chair. See?

Now the trouble is, some chairs convince you that they are not all that bad. They might kill you more slowly, in effect, and look! They are so beautiful. Like these ones (below). I just bought four of the suckers. I love dark orange.

The end of the world is correlated with the
Anthropocene, its global warming and subsequent drastic climate change,
whose precise scope remains uncertain while its reality is verified beyond
question. Throughout Hyperobjects I shall be calling it global warming
and not climate change. Why? Whatever the scientific and social reasons
for the predominance of “climate change” over “global warming” for naming this
particular hyperobject, the effect in social and
political discourse is plain enough. There has been a decrease in appropriate
levels of concern. Indeed, denialism is able to claim that “climate change” is
merely the rebranding of a fabrication, nay evidence of this fabrication in
flagrante delicto. On the terrain of media and the sociopolitical, “climate
change” has been such a failure that one is tempted to see the term itself as a
kind of denial, a reaction to the radical trauma of unprecedented global
warming. That the terms are presented as choices rather than as a package is a
symptom of this failure, since it is logically the case that it is correct to
say “climate change as a result of global warming,” where “climate change” is
just a compression of a more detailed phrase, a metonymy. If this is not the
case, then “climate change” as a substitute for “global warming” is like
“cultural change” as a substitute for Renaissance, or “change in living
conditions” as a substitute for Holocaust. “Climate change” as
substitute enables cynical reason (both right wing and left) to say that “climate
has always been changing,” which to my ears sounds like “people have always
been killing one another” as a fatuous reason not to control the sale of
machine guns. What we desperately need is an appropriate level of shock and
anxiety concerning a specific ecological trauma--indeed, theecological trauma of our age, the very
thing that defines the Anthropocene as such. This is why I shall be sticking
with the phrase global warming in this book.

You should look into your confusion further. You should push into it instead of closing yourself off. In that way, you just keep opening and unfolding, like flowers in the summertime. Even though they are exposed to the weather, to the wind and rain, flowers still keep unfolding themselves, until finally they bloom at their best. You could be like the flowers: you could let the bees sit on you and take your honey away, and that would be fine. You should not take time off from your confusion, or from the inconvenience or embarrassment of seeing that confusion.--Trungpa Rinpoche

either generates its own mode of power (steam, caloric, electromagnetic)

or << already existing natural force (wind, water)

engine more reliable because you don’t have to rely on stream or other conditions

“a system of machinery ... constitutes a huge automaton whenever it is driven by a self-acting prime mover” (Marx)

may require aid of workmen for some movements (mule carriage etc)

that would be such a great song title

as a literary scholar what does this have to do with poetics

or figures

Macherey, French 1966

uncannily one of his central texts was the novel Pinkus is thinking about, in debt to Robinson Crusoe

recommended to Emile

appreciated by boys in French 3rd republic

Jules Verne, Mysterious Island (1874)

exemplary for this method

explicit ideology of conquest of nature, harnessing of fuels as energy

also always colonialist (as Macherey notes)

for thinking the limits of criticism

slave, ape etc can transfer fuels from waiting to use almost immediately

all texts contain some kind of mystery or decollage between what author thinks he’s doing and what the text is really doing

we should return to texts such as Macherey to remind ourselves why we read in certain ways though we have internalized this

would such an astute critic be comfortable with repeating the book’s own structure

the real decollage of the novel lies beyond the plot or askew from it

in another theme: mobilis in mobile (man as a subject in a mobile universe)

coal >> electricity in Verne’s time

prediction of efficient coal machines in Australia and America

“without coal no more machines”

Cyrus Smith: in the future there will come a clean free form of fuel, water broken down by electricity will replace coal

“water is the coal of the future”

nothing about the energetic force required to make water into a fuel

a true rupture in the text, interrupted by barking of dog and ape

only one passage in the large portfolio of energy forms in the novel

but what if mobilis in mobile stands as a mode of reading

novels are all about the future in the present

deferral of water as a future fuel if we read Verne as mobile subjects

anxiety that all fuels may be used up and discovered

but the form of mobilis in mobile used in reading

fiction rather than science as the ideal way to discuss the conquest of nature = the nature of fuels

mobilis in mobile will have to persist

this is the pressure point of the novel

contradiction that Macherey encourages us to find

Agamben via Heidegger on dynamis and energeia

latter term should not be confused with energy

rather these concern being, the human capacity to do something

what does it mean to have a faculty

to be able to...

to be able to pass or not pass into action

Aristotle: dynamis maintains itself in relation to its own privation or nonbeing

a thing is said to be potential if when it is realized there is nothing in potential

the property of adynamia belongs to all dynamis for Agamben

so one could decide NOT to manufacture or use a fuel

dynamis has to do with being

potentiality to not-be that belongs to potentiality

thus when the potentiality passes fully into actuality

dynamis preserves itself as such in energeia

bringing wholly into the act as such

Derrida complicates any neat distinction between these terms

a “new era” in which we can’t distinguish between the virtual and the real (potentiality and actuality)

virtuality is inscribed in structure of event produced

affects time and space of image

everything that connects us to the actuality

doesn’t mention climate change or Anthropocene

yet it’s important to keep his words in mind for us

a kernel of hope in Agamben

not that we will find an alternative

nor that we will find a way to capture and store carbon

nor for a green revolution

or individual behavior in conservation of energy

conservation as the weak reform ensuring expenditure like the Factory Acts in Marx’s time

thus not fuels are consumed in energy

potentiality conserves itself IN actuality

potentiality survives actuality

and gives itself to itself

salvation analogy >> fuels? physical world? or remains in world of being?

if no power over that which is not being

fuels can only wait for us to not use them... !

Q&A

Anne. How potentiality is connected not to conservation but to the maximum capacity of human growth

this potential has already been used in terms of how we construct these terms

>> conservation discourse as a step back from the idea of usable reserves but also a minority discourse

potentiality <> usable-ness

AND: fuel >> energy as a literary method. Algeria movement of postcolonial France and Algeria. Can you comment?

Karen: Allan Stoekl. Question of maximum capacity. We don’t have a crisis of a lack of energy, we have plenty of energy and should expend it massively.

we need to expend even MORE energy...

things like “reserves” and “conservation” are undone by this book

shows how that is inscribed in logic that got us into the problem we are in now

fuel as figure and energy as discourse (in Lyotardian terms)

fuel might disrupt discourse

At what point does the fuel-energy loop begin?

me: Nagarjuna and al-Ghazzali (and OOO); occasionalism and magic

Foucault 1978

Western philosophy as machine that should just function like capital, we shouldn’t or mustn’t or can’t think outside of the West, or we should just allow China and India to “develop”--thinking otherwise would be orientalism

actuality as inert and dead (Dominic)

Dominic: electricity? as a system of energy?

Karen: it has to be fueled!

Joe: contemporary artists trying to turn energy back into fuel

Karen: fictional fuels, fuels that don’t work out

alchemy

coal and oil

base material and only after refining they become noble? when they are consumed?

turning energy back into fuel: reverse transmutation, a fear that a lot of early modern alchemists had

q on “the risk of ontologizing fuel”

objects enfueled (as against one of Bestand, we have it available)

A: I worry about reifying fuel, what am I not seeing about it...

I don’t have an answer to that

That is part of the process I’m going through

“the good thing before ‘bad’ energy”

Derek: perpetual motion machine

fantasy of being outside of thermodynamic time

narratives of deep time; fossil fuels lie under earth and then spent in an instant

how do those two fantasies relate to the conservation discourse

A: a text that you read that never has a beginning or an end (just development in my sense)

Dipesh: temporality in the sense of geological time

temporality of subsurface maybe doesn’t correspond very well to human narratives and literary texts

any attempts to narrativize deep time are flawed and fail to acknowledge the incredible difference between the realms

the idea of adequation through narrative is hard to believe

there is an encyclopedic quality of fuel: lots of different types; if you have a watermill why do you need a windmill?

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Hey Princeton, this is what I'm going to talk about with you. At the symposium “The Secret Life of Plants” in May:

WHAT VEGETABLES ARE SAYING ABOUT THEMSELVES

Schopenhauer argues that plants are manifestations of will—they just grow. In this sense, plants are just like algorithms, since algorithms don't know anything about number, they just execute computations. Thus algorithmic models of plants work just like plants, hence the success of the beautiful book The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants. A flower is a plot of an algorithm.

In this sense, a trope is an algorithm—a twist of language that emerges as meaning, by simply following a recipe (such as “jam two nouns together with the verb to be between them”). A trope is a flower of rhetoric, which is imagined as vegetative (anthos, hence anthology). Thus Milton's Satan curls around like a snake trying to turn into a vine.

That's what is disturbing about rhetoric and algorithms and plants and Satan—they exhibit a zero degree of intelligence, or not…we can't know in advance. Plants disturb us with what Lacan says “constitutes pretense”: “in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.” They might be lying, which in a sense means that they are lying.

Just as an algorithm could pass a Turing Test—I could discern thinking and personhood in this “blind” execution—so plants are posing, and passing Turing Tests all the time. In looking at a flower, you are doing the flower's job. Bees complete the Test all the time, by following the flower's nectar lines. Or, as Schopenhauer puts it, plants want to be known, because they can't quite know themselves.

Indeed, a plant in this sense is the zero degree of personhood—as Nietzsche said, people are halfway between plants and ghosts. This zero degree is a weird, twisted loop that says something like “This is not just a plant.” Consider the zero degree of the Cartesian cogito: the paranoia that I might simply be a puppet of some demonic external force. Isn't this just the creeping sensation that I might just be a vegetable?

In this sense, T.S. Eliot's line about flowers is perfect, from the plant's own point of view: “The roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at.”

There is to be some kind of criticism-off at UVA featuring me, Jennifer Wicke and Bruce Holsinger. Here is what I chose.

There's nothing I wouldn't be To get to be together There's nothing I wouldn't be My heart depends on me There's nothing I wouldn't do Including doing nothing There's nothing I wouldn't do For you to be with me now sugar

Each time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin Each time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin Nothing, oh nothing Because baby, baooo I'm a would be W. O. O. D. I'm a would be would be B. E. E. Z.

There's nothing I wouldn't do To make you want for nothing There's nothing I wouldn't do My heart belongs to you There's nothing we shouldn't do To get to be so happy There's nothing we shouldn't do Oh, let's forget taboo now sugar

Each time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin Each time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin Nothing, oh nothing Because baby, baooo I'm a would be W. O. O. D. I'm a would be would be B. E. E. Z.

Each time I love you You know what I need to do And each time I need you Oh, baby you know, you know, know, kn-know

(I) (Ooh! ) (Ooh! ) Each time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin Nothing, oh nothing Because baby, baooo I'm a would be I'm a would be W. O. O. D. I'm a would be would be B. E. E. Z.

There's nothing I wouldn't take Oh, even intravenous There's nothing I wouldn't take To get to be approved There's nothing I wouldn't be Oh that's the gift of schizo There's nothing that's new to me I've seen it all before now sugar

Each time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin Each time I go to bed I pray like Aretha Franklin Nothing, oh nothing Because baby, baooo I'm a would be W. O. O. D. I'm a would be would be B. E. E. Z.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Michael Tippett's Second Symphony, the presto. There is this thing that happens at 2:30. This recording is a little fast for me; I prefer Tippett's own version with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. But you'll see there are these three riffs that jam into one another in an amazing way.

It's a little known fact, however, that my dad started this band (Bournemouth) back some ago...

Friday, January 11, 2013

President Obama may authorize the minting of a trillion dollar coin to pay for policies that are already in place. Paying for what Congress has already done is, of course, a rather good idea.

Good idea, this coin suggestion, and not only because it would do an end run around the Republicans, who are caught in primitive defiance (in a way that endangers the world economy). It would also be an object lesson in what a sovereign power can do:

A state is not like a household in a state, contra the right wing Friedmanesque rhetoric of thirty years' vintage. Not a family. Not a person with credit card debt and a mortgage etc.

National debt and the debt ceiling are not like credit card debt and a personal credit limit.

Money is an arbitrary sign. (Just look at the way Brazil eased itself into the real, wiping its debt in a moment.) Cartoons of a gigantic coin crushing America remind me of the paper money panic in the Romantic period.

Enlightenment is like witnessing the brilliant sun for the first time in the morning. It is like seeing the beautiful flowers that grow in the wood, the frolicking deer, a bird flying proudly, or fish swimming. Life is not all that grim. In the morning you brush your teeth, you can see how shiny they are. Reality has its own gallantry, spark, and arrogance. You can study life while you are alive. You can study how you can achieve the brilliance of life. --Chögyam Trungpa

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

We are talking about Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of This Planet. And Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Jeffrey Kripal is presenting. Nice one. I'm wired that way I guess, although it was mega mega sad to read McCarthy's book today.

In the late eighteenth century, humans began to deposit a
thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust, a layer that is now detectable in Arctic
ice and in deep lakes. There thus begun what geology now calls the Anthropocene.

The literary period from the eighteenth century, though
long, contains some remarkable similarities both in terms of content and in
terms of form, similarities that we can now study under the aegis of the term Anthropocene.

In addition to investigating how literatures in English
tackle (or not) the Anthropocene, this capstone seminar will be exploring the
ways in which literary criticism and theory, and philosophy more generally, has
(and has not) addressed the topic of human intervention in ecological and
geological reality.

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci